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> so they finally discover how tightly coupled consciousness is to the matter in the nervous system and stop their embarrassing search for Holy Spirit How woul

> so they finally discover how tightly coupled consciousness is to the matter in the nervous system and stop their embarrassing search for Holy Spirit How would that explain out-of-body/near-death experiences? They happen to people, it's a fact. Sometimes people gain new information during them that they couldn't have possibly hallucinated by themselves, like being able to repeat a conversation that took place in another room while they were clinically dead. Within the framework of the modern science, the experience itself can be explained by the dying brain hallucinating it; the obtaining of new information from physically inaccessible parts of the reality, however, can not. Then there's also the phenomenon of people suddenly waking up, or having dreams about it, when someone close gets into an accident while they sleep. This can not be explained by modern science at all. It happens too often, to too many people, to be a simple coincidence. Then there's the phenomenon of heart transplant recipients receiving the memories of, and sometimes the ability to communicate with, their donors. This can be explained by some memories being stored in the heart cells, or in its nervous tissues. Now, I'm not really into pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, but because of how unexplained and under-researched the subject of nature of consciousness is, I try to keep an open mind. Those field theories in particular sound appealing. They haven't been proven, but they haven't been disproven either.

amatic 3y ago
I don't think it was ever proven in an experiment that an out of body experience or an NDE got some information from the real world, as opposed to information originating in the person's "brain". I don't know, but before there is confirmation in a controlled experiment, I just don't believe them. Much more likely is that their information is imagined and their certainty is a feeling they should not trust.
addaon 3y ago
> Then there's also the phenomenon of people suddenly waking up, or having dreams about it, when someone close gets into an accident while they sleep. This can not be explained by modern science at all. It happens too often, to too many people, to be a simple coincidence. I'm curious how you would estimate the number of people it should happen to by simple coincidence. Is enough data about the rates of the major expected causes (false memory formation after the fact, selective memory of dreams conditioned by conditions of waking) to provide a reasonable baseline? I honestly have no intuition if I would expect this number to be 0% or 50%, since I have no self-measurements (by definition) of how often I have dreams that I forget, and what portion of those dreams can be interpreted to match an external event if remembered.
plokiju 3y ago
you say gaining new information from out of body experiences are a fact. what's your evidence to back it up? I treat those kinds of stories the same way I'd treat an alien abduction or bigfoot story. humans are unreliable narrators. have there been any successful reproducible experiments on it?
- grishka 3y ago
  No, there were no scientific experiments to prove it. However, in absence of concrete proofs of either theory, both are equally probable to be true. The theory that consciousness arises from brain activity alone is just an assumption based on other research. It has never been properly proven or disproven either.
  - amatic 3y ago
    Well, it is not "brain activity alone", there are always light waves, forces, chemicals, and a lot of other things, acting on the brain from "outside" of the body, through some very strange receptor routs, but the "information" somehow travels. And we know 100% that for a lot of receptors, the firing rates depend on the intensity of the stimulus. So, we can see a direct correlation between, say, an applied force and golgi tendon organ firing. And at the same time, we discovered some types of radiation that we cannot see, and yet they can influence distant objects. I think that is pretty weird. So, we found a lot of direct correlations between brain activity and the outside world. Is there some need for an additional invisible field, not covered in current physics?
  - nprateem 3y ago
    I'm pretty open minded about this stuff, but I recall reading Robert Monroe (author of several books) tried to prove to himself his OBEs were real by having his wife place an object in a box downstairs without his knowledge and trying to find out what it was. IIRC he said he invariably got sidetracked between leaving his body and going downstairs, or would be attacked by entities of some kind. He suggested perhaps some kind of subconscious resistance to the experiment. He listed several times where he claimed to have gained knowledge without trying to while OBE but I wasn't entirely convinced by any of them, so who knows. The fact he claims to have had hundreds of OBEs and couldn't conclusively prove he could gain knowledge makes me sceptical that he wasn't just in a replica of reality generated by his mind. Anyway, they sound fun/scary/ real to the experiencer.
cess11 3y ago
I'm not aware of any firmly documented such cases of OOBE gained knowledge. Can you point me to five such cases? OOBE is a common side effect of dissociation. You can cause it through NMDA-antagonism, meditative practices and so on. If it was anything but a projection of perspective within the experiential system in the brain intelligence services and military would use it, and the lack of people in vegetative states around embassies tells us they don't.

amatic 3y ago

I don't think it was ever proven in an experiment that an out of body experience or an NDE got some information from the real world, as opposed to information originating in the person's "brain". I don't know, but before there is confirmation in a controlled experiment, I just don't believe them. Much more likely is that their information is imagined and their certainty is a feeling they should not trust.

addaon 3y ago

> Then there's also the phenomenon of people suddenly waking up, or having dreams about it, when someone close gets into an accident while they sleep. This can not be explained by modern science at all. It happens too often, to too many people, to be a simple coincidence. I'm curious how you would estimate the number of people it should happen to by simple coincidence. Is enough data about the rates of the major expected causes (false memory formation after the fact, selective memory of dreams conditioned by conditions of waking) to provide a reasonable baseline? I honestly have no intuition if I would expect this number to be 0% or 50%, since I have no self-measurements (by definition) of how often I have dreams that I forget, and what portion of those dreams can be interpreted to match an external event if remembered.

plokiju 3y ago

you say gaining new information from out of body experiences are a fact. what's your evidence to back it up? I treat those kinds of stories the same way I'd treat an alien abduction or bigfoot story. humans are unreliable narrators. have there been any successful reproducible experiments on it?

grishka 3y ago
No, there were no scientific experiments to prove it. However, in absence of concrete proofs of either theory, both are equally probable to be true. The theory that consciousness arises from brain activity alone is just an assumption based on other research. It has never been properly proven or disproven either.
- amatic 3y ago
  Well, it is not "brain activity alone", there are always light waves, forces, chemicals, and a lot of other things, acting on the brain from "outside" of the body, through some very strange receptor routs, but the "information" somehow travels. And we know 100% that for a lot of receptors, the firing rates depend on the intensity of the stimulus. So, we can see a direct correlation between, say, an applied force and golgi tendon organ firing. And at the same time, we discovered some types of radiation that we cannot see, and yet they can influence distant objects. I think that is pretty weird. So, we found a lot of direct correlations between brain activity and the outside world. Is there some need for an additional invisible field, not covered in current physics?
- nprateem 3y ago
  I'm pretty open minded about this stuff, but I recall reading Robert Monroe (author of several books) tried to prove to himself his OBEs were real by having his wife place an object in a box downstairs without his knowledge and trying to find out what it was. IIRC he said he invariably got sidetracked between leaving his body and going downstairs, or would be attacked by entities of some kind. He suggested perhaps some kind of subconscious resistance to the experiment. He listed several times where he claimed to have gained knowledge without trying to while OBE but I wasn't entirely convinced by any of them, so who knows. The fact he claims to have had hundreds of OBEs and couldn't conclusively prove he could gain knowledge makes me sceptical that he wasn't just in a replica of reality generated by his mind. Anyway, they sound fun/scary/ real to the experiencer.

cess11 3y ago

I'm not aware of any firmly documented such cases of OOBE gained knowledge. Can you point me to five such cases? OOBE is a common side effect of dissociation. You can cause it through NMDA-antagonism, meditative practices and so on. If it was anything but a projection of perspective within the experiential system in the brain intelligence services and military would use it, and the lack of people in vegetative states around embassies tells us they don't.